Valby Concert Band - Concert of the Golden Sun

Valby Concert Band

Valby Harmoniorkester invites the audience on a musical journey to Japan, presenting two major works: Toshio Mashima’s Les trois notes du Japon and Julie Giroux’s Bookmarks from Japan. The programme also features Joe Hisaishi’s iconic score from the animated film Spirited Away.

Les trois notes du Japon draws inspiration from French Impressionists such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, as well as from the wave of European Japonisme around the turn of the twentieth century. In three evocative tableaux, Mashima portrays the mating dance of cranes, a snow-covered river, and the vibrant “Fire Festival” — the Aomori Nebuta Matsuri. The result is a series of vivid, sensuous soundscapes that blend impressionistic colours and Western harmonies with classical Japanese compositional techniques.

Julie Giroux’s Bookmarks from Japan is a six-movement symphony inspired by celebrated Japanese woodblock prints. Like Mashima, Giroux expands the traditional Western concert band palette with Japanese percussion, while shaping her thematic material within traditional Japanese scales and infusing it with her distinctive American compositional voice.

Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away portrays a postmodern world in which capitalism and the relentless pursuit of profit exist in uneasy tension with nature and Japan’s cultural and spiritual heritage. In Joe Hisaishi’s score, this conflict is subtly but persistently present: the music shifts fluidly between major and minor, drawing on Japanese folk traditions as well as touches of jazz to create a sound world of luminous, shimmering ambiguity.